Monday, June 20, 2005 | 9:17 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
The NCAA is still messing with Tark.
I guess it has been enough years -- can it really be 13? -- since he last held court on the court around here that perhaps I should refer to Tark by Jerry Tarkanian, at least on first reference, for those who weren't around during the halcyon days of the UNLV basketball program.
I was going to say I should also do that for those who don't remember Tark. But then, if you were around, there's no way you could have forgotten him.
The retrospective on Tark's storied but controversial UNLV coaching career was supposed to air on the off day between this year's Final Four and Final Two on CBS. But it was postponed, supposedly at the NCAA's insistence, before finally being shown on Saturday. That was Saturday, June 18 -- or 75 days since North Carolina beat Illinois for the NCAA title.
While many maintain that basketball has become a year-round sport, in truth, that's only the NBA. College basketball, with its summer camps for high school hotshots subsidized by the shoe companies, is pretty close to becoming a year-round venture, although the coaches do take a few days off to play golf. I think June 18 is one of the days that even restricted income and graduate assistants are allowed to tee it up.
Maybe if Paris Hilton would have put on one of Larry Johnson's old No. 4 jerseys and washed his Hummer while Stacey Augmon turned the garden hose on her, perhaps somebody would have watched Tark's trials and tribulations on TV. Otherwise, the NCAA, as usual, got what it wanted. I doubt that with the big hitters pounding the fairways at the U.S. Open over on NBC and the Yankees beating the snot out of the Cubs on Fox there weren't too many tuned into the rehash of Tark's bitter battle with the NCAA and his own administration.
That's pretty much what it was, a rehash. But at least it was a fairly balanced rehash, which is probably what made the NCAA more nervous than the Ohio State coaching staff on the day mid-term grades are posted. In fact, I'd say "Rebels on the Run: The Rise and Fall of UNLV Basketball" probably leaned a bit toward Tark's corner. Score it 10-9 in favor of the old coach, who led the Rebels to 509 victories, four Final Four appearances and the 1990 national championship.
Actually, I didn't know quite what to expect when I heard the voice of the narrator. It was actor Ray Liotta, who played Shoeless Joe Jackson in "Field of Dreams" and stool pigeon Henry Hill in "GoodFellas." Liotta also narrated a cable special on John Gotti last week, and I thought it might only be a matter of time until he started confusing Dr. Bob Maxson, the former UNLV president who essentially ran Tark out of town, with Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the FBA informant who essentially ran Gotti into a maximum security cell.
But Tark's cronies would probably tell you those two are easily confused.
As noted, there really was nothing new to be gleaned from the special, and given that the primary sound bite specialists were Jimmy Kimmell, a Green Valley native and former UNLV fan who may or may not still host a late-night talk show; and Denny Crum, one of Tark's former coaching cohorts who most definitely does not still coach Louisville, perhaps that was to be expected.
That Seth Davis guy from Sports Illustrated, wearing a thin disguise in his role of Tark detractor, mentioned that the common denominator at Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State, three basketball programs that ran afoul of the NCAA, was that Tark was the coach at all three.
But somebody almost as insignificant -- I think it was Tom Hawkins, the long forgotten Notre Dame star and NBC college basketball analyst -- countered that the only reason Tark took a flier on risky recruits such as Lloyd Daniels, who got the Rebels into the NCAA's hoosegow despite never scoring a single basket here, was that mid-major schools such as Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State could never out-recruit UCLA and Duke and Notre Dame for the true impact players.
In that I only covered Tark's last two teams here from a distance -- guys who write sidebars on NCAA tournament games usually don't have a feel for what is going on within the program's inner sanctum -- I have never felt qualified to pontificate about the man, other than to say he always returned phone calls and was more approachable than Kirstie Alley after dessert.
I suppose if the NCAA held a manual to my head, I probably would have sided with the Davis faction. Blame it on my holier-than-thou Indiana upbringing, where, at least in my formative years, it was always In Bob We Trust.
But then there was that $2.5 million settlement Tark received from the NCAA witch hunters, and the older and semi-wiser I get, I keep going back to what Hawkins said, and how difficult it is for mid-major schools to keep up with the NCAA Joneses on the college sanctioning body's far-from-level playing field.
Do you think if Tark was the coach at Duke and Grant Hill and Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley and all those other McDonald's All-Americans with straight A's in the classroom as well as on the basketball court were lining up to play ball for him that he really would have recruited somebody with a past like Daniels?
The more I think about it, the more I believe Tark wasn't so much guilty of exploiting the system, but only of trying to survive within it.
archive
